Conventional retail marketing of articles provides stores with large floor areas. Among these are department stores and discount stores that sell clothing and dry goods and supermarkets and grocery stores that sell items of food. These stores use various devices, such as racks, shelves, and tables, for holding articles to be selected and purchased by consumers. The racks, shelves, and tables are placed in the floor areas. The spaces between these devices define aisles for consumers to pass for selecting articles for purchase. The devices occupy a large proportion of the floor space. The racks, shelves and tables often are specialty devices designed for holding the particular articles. For example, tubular rings attached to stands hold garments on hangers. The racks have pegs that protrude for holding cards to which articles are attached. Other racks provide laterally extending shelves for supporting goods such as clothes, food articles, paper products, and the like.
Supermarkets, or grocery stores, are a common facility that have a number of elongated shelving for holding articles to be selected by consumers. The shelving is spaced apart to define aisles along which consumers pass to view and select articles held on the shelving. Each of the shelving typically includes a number of vertically-spaced horizontal shelves that extend laterally from a support. The articles to be selected are typically grouped with similar articles on the shelves. For example, soups are typically grouped together in one section of the store. Thus, consumers make select and pick from similar articles and goods offered by different manufacturers.
Conventional shopping, however, is time consuming. The consumer moves along the aisles selecting articles from the shelves. Some consumers are organized and have a list of articles for selection. Some consumers organize the list of goods by the layout of the store. Such grouping of goods, however, requires the consumer know the organization and layout of the store. Other consumers shop more casually by beginning at one point in the store and walking along the aisles selecting articles as they come across them. Often consumers recall the need to purchase an article in another area of the store and spend time retracing steps or walking along the aisles to locate the particular article in the store.
Such purchasing and shopping activities can be crowded and time consuming. Aisles may be crowded particularly during peak shopping hours. Check-out lines may further delay the shopping trip. Erroneous charges must be corrected and coupons have to be deducted. A recent study of two-career couples indicates that shopping adds stress to lives. About 64% of dual-income and 53% of single-income families in the United States said they have less time to shop now than five years ago. Shopping requires time that could otherwise be spent with children and at leisure. This study shows that in the United States, wives spend an average of 8.1 hours per week shopping, while their husbands shop for an average of 2.9 hours per week.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an improved apparatus for selecting articles for purchase to reduce the time and effort required to shop. It is to the provision of an improved article selecting and collecting apparatus that the present invention is primarily directed.